Drinking on a Monday is a short column where I share that one bottle that I open after the most dreadful of all weekdays.

Less hop forward than the ‘mosaic’ title would imply, but still a tasty beer

I took last week off from posting a DOAM featured bottle, partially due to time and partially because it was a dry few weeks in terms of bottles that I felt like I needed to talk about. I don’t want to write beer reviews for the sake of them, and just rehash all the typical descriptors for a double IPA. I want to point to breweries and beers that I really like and think others will like too, and I love Prairie Artisan Ales from Oklahoma. The brother-run brewery is doing really fantastic things in the farmhouse world, so despite this bottle being $13.99 for 16 oz, I couldn’t pass it up when I visited Buzz in DTLA a few weeks back.

Funky Gold Mosaic is deliciously funky grapefruit juice. Its pours golden orange and has a fairly thick white head. The color is opaque which adds to its fruit-juice-like appearance. With mosaic being the go-to hop for the last year or so, I expected more on the nose on this one, but this is all citrus and yeast esters. I’m sure a lot of that comes from the hops, but its pretty well integrated into the beer overall and doesn’t jump out as overly dry-hopped. The flavor is dry grapefruit and apricot, following by some good farmhouse hay and funk. Its slightly tart, not sour and infinitely drinkable.

There’s a lot of characteristics here that remind me of Monkish’s Selah (which I actually prefer), but this one is different enough from the other Prairie releases to really stand on its own two feet. Prairie Ales will be one of the featured breweries at the Shelton Brothers’ Festival in the Port of LA in November and (along with Jesterking) will definitely be one of my first stops at the fest.